Note to Self: Eating Frogs May Relieve Nausea

As I’ve remarked before in this space, mornings are my best time. If I wake up feeling crappy, my mood tends to slide downward from there.

Imagine my distress, then, when I woke up yesterday feeling a firm two on a scale from zero to 10. Zero equals catatonic depression, while 10 is psychotic mania (I’ve never experienced over about a seven); five is calm, energetic normalcy. My stomach was churning with anxiety, terrible thoughts were erupting into my brain and blossoming there, and it took a Herculean effort and a few cups of coffee to get started with my morning tasks.

I actually considered staying home to see if lying in bed and staring at the wall would somehow prove therapeutic. I could easily guess why I felt such distress. I was procrastinating about answering two dreaded emails at work; I was also scheduled to give a big presentation, and I felt too miserable to go through with it.

So once I got to work I took action on two fronts. First, I completed the “Prescription for Procrastinators” exercise from David Burns’ Feeling Good Handbook, which I’ve mentioned before in this space. Then, as one writer on procrastination puts it, I promptly swallowed my morning frogs — i.e., I read and answered the damn emails.

Having done that, and thereby gaining a small but measurable mood lift, I printed out my presentation, shut myself in an empty team room, and did two back-to-back dry runs complete with gestures. My mood subsequently improved from a two to a four — a 20% increase through two activities that took less than 45 minutes.

So the moral of the story is, don’t kiss your frogs, swallow them.

But seriously, folks — though I know that procrastination depresses me significantly, I really didn’t expect such dramatic results. I can guarantee you that if I hadn’t started the day by slaying procrastination, I would have approached my presentation with significantly less energy. And after I gave a well-rehearsed, kick-ass presentation, I was briefly just below a six. Sure, the high faded, but the overall average mood of the day benefited remarkably from the simple act of frog-swallowing.

Revolt and Resignation

In his collection of essays On Aging, Holocaust survivor Jean Amery said that one must meet the phenomenon of aging -- inevitable yet terrifying -- with both revolt and resignation. So it is with mental illness. To deny that I will always be manic-depressive would be true madness; at the same time, I must revolt against my condition, rejecting the idea that it defines and limits me.